A victory for the people of Bodo, Nigeria

Thousands of hectares of mangrove forest were damaged following two major oil spills in Bodo in 2008 and 2009.

The spills also polluted lo cal rivers and waterways. Following a court case brought by Bodo residents in the UK with the help of UK law firm Leigh Day, Shell finally agreed to an out of court settlement of £55 million. The money is to be divided between individual payments and a sum to the community as a whole and will go some way to rebuilding livelihoods.

In a separate initiative, Shell has now also finally committed to beginning the clean-up in the next three months. I imagine many will be watching to see if this happens. How quickly the local ecosystem and rivers recover will also be something to monitor.

Chief Sylvester Kogbara, Chairman of the Bodo Council of Chiefs and Elders, responded to the news thanking Bodo’s international lawyers, Leigh Day, for their “strength”, “perseverance” and “tenacity”. He also thanked Nigerian and international NGOs, in particular, Amnesty International, who campaigned in support of their case.

We here at Friends of the Earth have benefitted from Leigh Day’s expertise and it was fantastic to see their efforts pay off in what will hopefully become a landmark case.

This is definitely a victory and I want to pay tribute to the community and those others who have campaigned for justice in Bodo . It shows the importance and relevance of international solidarity with community struggles.

The outcome could have been very different. After all, while it accepted responsibility for the spills, Shell originally offered a mere £4000 as settlement to the whole community and documents it was forced to hand over in court in the UK showed that it had repeatedly made false claims about the size and impact of the two spills in Bodo.

Moreover, the spills were probably preventable and the extent of the damage certainly so: Shell knew the pipes were old; there was a delay of several weeks before the pipes were repaired, during which time oil continued to pump into the nearby waterways.

The court documents also showed that thousands more people in Ogoniland – where Bodo is situated – are still at risk from spills due to the state of sections of pipes, qualified as “major risk and hazard”.

So the fight for justice and to prevent more environmental destruction, to increase accountability for corporations continues.

Friends of the Earth and its sister groups, in particular and Nigeria, have frequently criticised Shell for failing to prevent or clean up spills.

Other residents of the Niger Delta have sought justice in international courts and on 15 March an appeal in the case of four Nigerian farmers who brought a suit against Shell in the Netherlands for damage caused in Nigeria will be heard including in Ikot Ada Udo. At an earlier hearing in 2013 the court did not accept that Shell was responsible for damage in all the communities concerned, a verdict which was appealed.

This case was filed in conjunction with Friends of the Earth Netherlands and supported by Friends of the Earth Nigeria. Hearing the news about Bodo my colleague Geert Ritsema, of Friends of the Earth Netherlands, commented that it was a great victory and sets an important precedent but more remains to be done to address environmental damage caused by Shell’s operations in the Niger Delta.

Both cases are reminders of toxic legacy of dirty energy. They are also another demonstration of the need to phase out fossil fuels controlled by corporate interests and the need to transition to clean energy alternatives suitable to and mandated by communities.

Join our email list and find out more about Friends of the Earth’s work on environmental justice.